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German Goodgame Studios bought by Stillfront (Unravel, Call of - & World at War)

Bufbaf

Bufbaf

Don't F5!
Member
Oct 25, 2017
12,631
Hamburg, Germany
Disclaimer: I was spending a substantial part of my life working at Goodgame Studios.

I don't know if people over here actually care for it, but hey, I did, and maybe others do. Also, it's news I guess, so here's some news aggregation.

During the last few years, Goodgame Studios came up in German news a lot due to quite some bothersome news about firing employees over trying to set up a workers' council, as well as more firings out of nowhere due to scale down the company. After these significant problems, they seem to be on track again writing black numbers, with their most successful titles being "Goodgame Empire", "Big Farm" and their respective mobile versions.

From Stillfront's page:

December 6, 2017

Stillfront Group has today announced its acquisition of a leading German gaming company, GoodGame Studios. GoodGame Studios has had huge successes with the games Empire (browser), Empire 4 Kingdoms (mobile), BigFarm (browser) and BigFarm Mobile Harvest (mobile). GoodGame has had more than 1 bilion USD in deposits over the years and has more than 340 million registered users.

Stillfront and GoodGames constitute a great match, sharing values of focusing on long life strategy games. GoodGames will operate in the same way as the current Stillfront studios, i.e. semi-autonomous. Stillfront Group's management will stay intact with Jörgen Larsson as the CEO, and the operating model will be unchanged.

GoodGames' marketing excellence can be applied to selected Stillfront games and Stillfront's technical abilities will be valuable to GoodGames.

The combined unit Stillfront/GoodGames has approx 390 employees and revenues of 794 MSEK in Jan – Sep 2017 and an EBIT of 220 MSEK.
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The whole deal's here:
https://globenewswire.com/news-rele...-AB-Stillfront-acquires-Goodgame-Studios.html
 
Com_Raven

Com_Raven

Brand Manager
Verified
Oct 27, 2017
1,103
Europa
As you said, the last few years were not very kind to Goodgame, so maybe this can be a turnaround of sorts. I remember when they had the glorious idea to do mass layoffs during gamescom hoping it would be overshadowed, but instead it was the only thing people talked about at the industry party.
 
Oynox

Oynox

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
884
Make German games great again lol

Probably they just continue releasing F2P trash on mobile... but let's hope for something better!
 
Bonejack

Bonejack

Member
Oct 27, 2017
16,654
Hmm, hearing about this makes me wonder how Gameforge is doing these days. Couple of years back, they too had troubles.

Just flew over the deal at the link, but didn't find anything about the employees. Are their jobs safe for now? Would hate to read about firings this close to the holidays.
 
Com_Raven

Com_Raven

Brand Manager
Verified
Oct 27, 2017
1,103
Europa
Bonejack said:
Hmm, hearing about this makes me wonder how Gameforge is doing these days. Couple of years back, they too had troubles.

Just flew over the deal at the link, but didn't find anything about the employees. Are their jobs safe for now? Would hate to read about firings this close to the holidays.
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Probably fair to say that Gameforge had better days. They laid of most of their marketing department last year (or so was told), and cut down quite a bit on their game portfolio (Orcs Must Die, Dropzone). Seems they went back to their evergreens like oGame and Metin 2...
 
Mivey

Mivey

Member
Oct 25, 2017
17,808
Unravel was made by Coldwood Interactive, and published by EA. Seems completely unrelated here.
 
Com_Raven

Com_Raven

Brand Manager
Verified
Oct 27, 2017
1,103
Europa
Mivey said:
Unravel was made by Coldwood Interactive, and published by EA. Seems completely unrelated here.
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Their website disagrees with you:

About Stillfront
Stillfront is a group of independent creators, publishers, and distributors of digital games – with a vision to become the leading group of indie game creators and publishers. Stillfront operates through eight near-autonomous subsidiaries: Bytro Labs in Germany, Coldwood Interactive in Sweden, Power Challenge in the UK and Sweden, Dorado Online Games in Malta, Simutronics in the United States, Babil Games in UAE and Jordan, eRepublik in Ireland and Romania and OFM Studios in Germany

http://www.stillfront.com/site/
 
Mivey

Mivey

Member
Oct 25, 2017
17,808
Ah yes. Mentions here that Stillfront bought them. Thought it was an independent company, my bad.
 
Yoshi

Yoshi

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
2,055
Germany
Actually when I saw this thread I was thinking about asking you if you were fine (until I saw (1) that you made the thread and (2) you don't work there anymore).
 
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